


A Delicate Hand

by bomberqueen17



Series: Meet Death Sitting [16]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Developing Relationship, Empress Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Miscommunication, Nonbinary Lambert (The Witcher), Other, Past Aiden/Lambert (The Witcher), Post-The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Self-Sacrifice, Witcher 3 Spoilers, intersex Keira Metz, nonbinary characters - Freeform, this is working up to a plot i promise you, traumatized characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2020-12-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:54:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27578783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Some careful and not entirely successful negotations about relationships and attempts to lay the past to rest, which go somewhat awry. Direct continuation of The Ideal Man.
Relationships: Lambert/Keira Metz
Series: Meet Death Sitting [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639717
Comments: 125
Kudos: 175





	1. Absorb The Lesson

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: nothing notable, an intersex character engages in some negative self-talk regarding being denied self-worth as a GNC child.

Keira had never lived domestically with someone like this before. She’d had various lovers, she’d lived within noble households and the like, she’d had close gossip-friends, she hadn’t been a _loner_ except briefly and never by choice, but she’d never done this, just had one other person in her whole household, who made her food and stayed up late talking with her and slept, sometimes, in her bed, and all. It was easy to get used to, and it was very hard to remember that this wasn’t a love story. She wasn’t the kind of person that sort of thing happened to; she’d been dumb enough to daydream about it sometimes as a youth, had even spent a brief portion of her life actually expecting to experience it someday, and all of that had been torn out of her by the cruelties of real life, over and over, until she had mostly managed to absorb the lesson.

She reminded herself more or less daily that this wasn’t her love story, this was a matter of convenience for this winter. She was hoping for better than exile; the Emperor had dangled the prospect of pardons for all of the former Lodge of Sorceresses, and when his new regime was solidified, he would certainly have need of mages. Perhaps she could secure some sort of academic or research post, which would really suit her right down to the ground; she’d lost all of her taste for court politics, what little she’d ever had of it, and in a new world where there weren’t so many courts, perhaps she could finally be free of the necessity of such things.

And surely Lambert was hoping for better as well. With his beloved niece safely ensconced as the Crown Princess, well-- surely the surviving Witchers of the Wolf School had good prospects, going forward. No, he was going to find somewhere more pleasant to land. She could flatter herself that perhaps he’d still remain her lover and seek her out from time to time, as long as she made it good for him, and that would be pleasant indeed. She’d never had a lover who she felt she could trust like this, who’d proven himself not out to get her-- certainly not one who she’d felt she could express herself to, like this.

Though, on the other hand, when they each moved on, perhaps it would be best to part on a sweet note, and leave him to be a pleasant memory. Every other time Keira had thought something was going well, it had ended badly, usually in betrayal, so it was foolish to think that this wouldn’t, too. And as she lay awake sometimes in the early mornings, listening to the weirdly slow soft hitch of his breath, she had time to dwell horribly on what exactly it would feel like when he finally broke cover and laughed at her, like everyone did eventually, when she finally realized the game had gotten ahead of her somehow yet again, as it always did.

It would break her, surely, she thought, but then she’d thought that before. She’d survived a lot of things, many of them things that no one ought to, and she always came out of it just fine, if a little bent in places, and really all of her places were bent by now, and didn’t line up properly with everyone else’s, and that was just how it was.

Part of her problem was that most people she spoke to seemed to have at one point in their life experienced the concept of actually genuinely being loved, even if only by a parent, even if only briefly, and she’d never even had that so she had no idea what it was actually supposed to do to you.

(She’d been born wrong; why did people seem so surprised to discover that had rather prevented even her mother from bearing her much affection? She’d really never meant to admit it, had only brought it up a time or two, and tended to try to keep it tucked away in the back of her mind where nobody else could discover it. But plenty of people had terrible backstories. Other mages seemed to have managed to achieve grown-up relationships with big-L Love and such, and Kiera never had, and was old enough to have decided it was all a bunch of foolishness, but. It didn’t help when a pretty not-exactly-boy kept staring into her face and saying soft things and understanding things about her she’d never even understood herself and fucking her tenderly and beautifully and crying in her bed and such. It was incredibly difficult to keep her head straight, in the face of that sort of provocation. It would help if anyone had ever loved her or been in love with her, so she’d know the difference, but nobody ever had, and she was on her own to attempt to stay grounded in some kind of reality here.)

“You call that finely chopped?” he said, leaning over to peer at her cutting board. “Pah, keep going, you’re terrible at this.”

Keira rolled her eyes, put down the knife, drew from one of the focus object beads on her necklace, and reduced the onion on the cutting board to a tiny, uniform mince before passing him the board.

“Now,” he said, “that’s cheating,” and eyed her. “You didn’t get your headache back,” he went on.

“No,” she said, “you goof, I used one of my focus objects, I’m not an idiot.”

“You’re counting on me to refill that, aren’t you,” he said.

“I keep you in sexual slavery,” she said, dumping the finely minced onion in the bowl and setting to work on the carrot. She cut that one finely by hand. She wasn’t experienced in cooking, but herbcrafting for alchemy got one rather good at knife-work.

“It’s a hard job,” he said. “You might as well be a succubus, draining my life ene-- hey, is that how they work?”

“Not exactly?” Keira said. “I don’t think, anyway. It’s probably related, though! I should see if I can’t get a book about it.” She bit her lip, considering. “Who’s got a court position somewhere with a library?”

“Does anyone have court positions anymore?” Lambert was searing meat he’d either bought in town or hunted, she hadn’t asked.

“I don’t really know,” she said, contemplating it. “Rita probably has access to libraries... Philippa, even more likely, but-- brr. I won’t ask that woman for anything, if I can avoid it.”

“I don’t reckon I know her,” Lambert said, shooting her a sidelong look.

“Terrifying,” Keira said. “She’s-- she’s just terrifying.” She was _certainly_ one of the ones who’d taught Keira never to assume that someone’s friendly demeanor meant they wouldn’t betray you to your death if that were the most convenient or even just amusing thing for them. “Brr.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Lambert said.

“ _Do_ ,” Keira said. “Above _all_ else, never _ever_ owe her a favor.”

“Noted,” Lambert said.

“Yennefer was never… all that scholarly,” Keira said. “I suppose I’m on good terms with her currently but she’s not the sort I’d expect to be good for finding esoteric magical knowledge.”

“Probably, Ciri’s the one to ask,” Lambert said.

“She _does_ have the best access to libraries of _anyone I know_ ,” Keira allowed. She tilted the cutting board toward Lambert. “Is that a reasonable dice?”

“That’s fine,” he said, “since the onion’s mush.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “But I just-- I mean, I know I stuck my neck out to literally fight on her behalf, but I don’t know that Cirilla would do me any particular favors,” she ventured.

“I mean,” Lambert said, “it’s not like you’re asking her for a lot. If you wanted to go use one of their research libraries and you asked Ciri nicely I can’t see as she’d deny you or anyone would dare say a word against you.”

“Mm,” Keira said, unconvinced. “Well, I mean, it’s just for an idle question. It’s not really worth risking attracting the attention of any sort of government officials.”

“Ciri doesn’t count as a _government official_ ,” Lambert said.

Keira was dicing another carrot, and used eating a chunk of it as an excuse not to answer that patently ridiculous assertion. Regardless of his attachment to the woman, the Crown Princess was absofuckinglutely a government official. But sometimes Lambert disliked having extremely obvious things pointed out, and sometimes it was worth it to set him off and sometimes it was not, and at the moment Keira was having too much fun bullshitting with him to want him to go on a rant.

“I see you avoiding answering that,” Lambert said, and pulled the meat out of the pan and set it aside to rest.

Keira was going to have to eat sparingly; she had trouble sometimes with red meat. Occasionally she was reminded that while mages were ageless, they did still experience age-related changes to their bodies, and she’d read of mages who had suffered heart disease or other degenerative conditions. It really wouldn’t do to have survived the witch-hunters, and before that, all of the various court bullshit, and all of Aretuza, to be eventually laid low by whatever her low-key digestive issues with rich food were.

“Triss has books,” Keira said, whiplashing herself back to the earlier topic. “I bet she’d have a book about what kind of magic succubi do.”

“I had to memorize so many bestiaries,” Lambert said, his apparent good mood making him willing to follow her back to the earlier topic, “and you’d think they’d talk about what magic succubi do, but mostly they were concerned with shit like _Shall ye find yrself facing sych a beste ye muft avail yrself of yon filvere fworde & bee ware ye the fyre from their handf _and suchlike. I can tell you from my studies that they’re related distantly to fiends and chorts and so have a susceptibility to relict oil, I can tell you from firsthand experience that while the book says they’re nonviolent sometimes they’re mean as fuck and your only hope is explosive bolts, and I can also tell you from firsthand experience that if you ever, ever, _ever_ see any young with them you best run like the fuckin’ wind and don’t even look back. But that goes for chorts too.”

“But do they draw on sexual energy the way I’ve been taught to make focus objects,” Keira said, trying to reel him back in. “That’s the question.”

“Maybe you could ask Eskel,” Lambert said, and then sniggered, and she gave him a look.

“Why would Eskel know?” she asked slowly.

“I mean, he probably _wouldn’t_ know,” Lambert said. “I doubt he was paying attention that closely.”

“Did he fuck one?” Keira asked, delighted as she connected the two points to make a rhetorical throughline.

“Phew,” Lambert said, “yes, and apparently did so while high on fisstech, so--”

“ _Eskel_?” Keira demanded in a near-shriek, clutching the rest of her carrot to her chest and nearly stabbing herself with the paring knife.

“I know!” Lambert said, stirring whatever was in the pan now. “I know! Fuckin-- you gotta look out for the quiet ones!”

“Sweet Goddess preserve us,” Keira said, retrieving her carrot and resuming her work.

“I need you to chop faster,” he said, “the rest of this is getting too done.”

Keira rolled her eyes, and piled the rest of the vegetables onto the cutting board and used another one of her focus objects to power a spell that instantly peeled the celeriac and reduced all of the vegetables to a moderate dice. “Here,” she said.

“Showoff,” he grumbled, and dumped everything into the pan.

“Out of _all_ of you,” Keira said, “I did not expect _Eskel_ \--”

“You gotta watch out for the quiet ones,” Lambert said. “Anyway-- if you think about it more, though, I mean, Geralt will fuck anything but he’ll definitely get himself sucked into some drama about it, and me-- well-- I got my own problems, but Eskel’s real good at just. Being reasonable and sensible and--”

“And fucking a succubus high on fisstech,” Keira finished, rather than asking him what _his own problems_ meant.

“Well, right,” Lambert said, “but he got out of it fine and the first we heard about it was a truth or dare drinking game, right, whereas if it were Geralt he would’ve somehow started a war about it, and if it were me, well-- it just wouldn’t be me, that’s really that.”

“No?” she asked. Now she couldn’t even begin to guess what _my own problems_ meant.

Lambert made a face. “I mean,” he said, “specifically, my first encounter with a succubus I was like, twenty, and I was going to save everybody, and I went in super earnestly to talk to her about why killing people was wrong, and she just about succeeded in murdering me and like everyone in the village, so like. Specifically, no, I’m scared as fuck of succubi so there’s no way that’s happening.”

“But that’s more specific than we were really being,” she said.

“Ah,” he said, “it’s as specific as I’m being.” His mood had shifted a little, and he looked serious, and a little sad.

She pouted at him briefly, trying to bring the mood back up, and he rolled his eyes, but in a moment he relented. “Eh,” he said, stirring studiously as whatever was going on in the pot gave off delectable scents. “Thing is. So Aiden and I, we-- it wasn’t like. We weren’t. We weren’t like, _married_ , you know?”

“Ah,” she said.

“We had a deal where-- I mean, when you’re not around each other much, and when life’s so cold and hard and dangerous and all.” He wasn’t looking at her at all, and was making much of paying attention to what he was doing. “Like, our deal was, if the chance came up, we were-- it was fine to fuck other people, you know?”

“Ah,” she said, not really seeing where he was going with this. “Wait,” she said, trying to salvage the earlier light mood with a joke, “so Aiden told you to go fuck a succubus and it went badly?”

He laughed humorlessly. “No,” he said, “but, I mean, if I had, he wouldn’t have--” He paused, and looked into middle distance for a moment. “No, I think he’d’ve told me if he ever did. And he did-- he fucked other people all the time, and it genuinely didn’t bother me. I really-- I’d’ve told him to stop, if I didn’t want him to do it, but it really wasn’t something that I minded.”

“All right,” she said, not understanding what he was getting at.

“Well,” he said. “I just-- I never did. I didn’t fuck other people. I’d-- sometimes in the winters when I was super lonely or-- well, drunk, Eskel and I would give each other handjobs or something, but I never.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t that I was being virtuous or something. I just didn’t want to. Didn’t want anybody else.”

It took Keira a moment to be able to make any sort of facial expression, but fortunately Lambert was still so busy being absorbed in what he was cooking that he didn’t see whatever her face had been doing in the meantime. It felt like she’d been stabbed, like her lungs didn’t work for a minute, and then she managed to haul in a quiet breath and smile softly.

“That’s very sweet,” she said.

He never wanted anyone but the guy he’d been in love with.

So now that he’d never have that again-- what, now he could bring himself to-- she couldn’t really think about it, it was just a big numb space in her head.

“I mean,” he said, “I wouldn’t call it sweet, it was just how it was. I’m not-- and before him I didn’t really-- I don’t want people very often, it’s not how I’m. Er, Put together, I guess.”

“Huh,” she said, to cover the blank hole where her entire personality had been, as she had to take a break to work through this. What did he mean by that? What did that-- he didn’t want-- what was he saying? This wasn’t-- well, it didn’t change anything. Did it? What did it change? No, nothing. She managed a slow, level breath. Her chest hurt strangely. Maybe she was developing heart disease or something after all. She needed to research that.

Anyway it didn’t change anything. They were both just passing time here, and-- this didn’t change anything, and.

Did he not actually-- but he, she wasn’t _forcing_ him, he was coming to her of his own free will, he was even _initiating_ things, she wasn’t, what, _fooling_ him into fucking her. He was enjoying it just as much as she was. Surely he was--

She didn’t know what he was trying to tell her.

Well, it didn’t change anything.

They were just passing what would otherwise be a very long, cold, boring winter.

Lambert was genuinely absorbed in his work now, frowning as he concentrated on scraping the pan, using several folds of his apron to adjust the pan’s position on the fire and swearing softly as the pan was clearly slightly too hot and he risked burning the food.

“Do you have anything of his, anymore?” Keira asked quietly, frowning absently into the fire.

“Huh?” Lambert asked. “What do you mean?”

“Any items that were his,” she said. “Anything that would still… have his resonance. Do you have his medallion?”

“No,” Lambert said, a little curt, and scraped at the pan for a moment before collecting himself and saying, “No. I tried, I-- but they took his medallion and his swords for the bounty, I think. Ah, maybe his head too, I don’t know. I never found his body, I never found his head, never found his medallion or his swords. Like I said, it was months before I even knew he was dead, and by then-- ”

“If you have anything of his,” she said, “I could use it to find that medallion. Maybe the swords too, it depends on how long he’d had them.”

Lambert laughed, a little incredulous, and finally looked at her. “Long time,” he said. “He carried-- both of them, I think, he’d had the same ones a long time.” He looked her in the face a moment, solemn, and then looked back at the food and swore, scraping at it. “This is fine,” he said, “it’ll be-- yeah, there we go. Just a minute longer.”

She waited a moment, and finally Lambert said, “I do have some things of his. Mostly knives, a shirt or two, some odds and ends.”

“If you’d rather not,” she said.

“No,” he said, sharply, “I-- fuck, I _literally killed_ people trying to get the, the medallion, or at least one of the swords, or-- fuck, _something_ ,” and he had to pause and wipe one of his eyes. “Sorry. I’m just. I’m still angry. Karadin died too fucking quick.”

“I’m not trying to--” she said.

“No,” he cut in. “No, Keira, you’re-- no. Thank you. I would-- thank you. For even-- for even listening.” His voice sank, went quiet.

She gathered herself, knocked her shoulder against his. “Of course,” she said softly.

He turned and kissed her cheek, up on the cheekbone back by her ear, a quick but seemingly heartfelt peck.

Her chest still hurt, strangely, and she surreptitiously rubbed at her breastbone as she put on a smile for him.

* * *

Lambert felt oddly like he had his guts just splayed out on the table, his heart in his hands, and Keira was sitting there, composed and self-contained, eyes distant and expression cool, dispassionately poking through all of it. He could see enough to tell that he couldn’t see what she was looking at; her eyes were focused beyond the plane where the items rested, and she had her hands outstretched over what really, now that he looked at it, was a pretty pathetic assemblage of items.

Three knives, two of them in sheaths, plus a knife sheath with one of Lambert’s own knives in it, a shirt, three pairs of socks plus one odd one that needed mending, some potion bottles with distinctive glassblowers’ stamps, a set of leather bottle-wraps, some frayed braid-lace with the aiglets pried off, said aiglets now wrapped around new laces, a pair of worn runestones, three handkerchiefs, a much-folded page of faded writing, and a very worn bit of rawhide lacing. Those were the items in Lambert’s possession that had belonged to Aiden.

Gifts Aiden had purchased to give to Lambert were unsuitable, Keira had said, sparing Lambert the exquisite confusion of digging out any of the items of lingerie or that one pair of shoes. The thought of putting his assorted gifts on display in that sort of context seemed wrong, so Lambert was glad of it, but he did want to see what she thought of the shoes, but also was a little nervous of what she might think even after all they’d discussed so far, so. At any rate, it was irrelevant to the current situation.

She’d been odd and distant ever since his awkward little confession of feelings last night. He hadn’t been able to make himself look at her, so he wasn’t sure how she’d taken it in the moment, and then the subject had changed-- he still wasn’t sure how-- to this topic, and now they were caught up in this. He didn’t know what she thought. She’d been pretty up-front, in the beginning, that she wasn’t much for romantic sentiments and all, but he’d started to think perhaps her heart might be changing, had started to think that maybe admitting this wasn’t just convenience for him wouldn’t go amiss.

Really he hadn’t thought he’d actually had to say anything; he was obviously in too deep here but she had seemed to be pretty close to the same page, if not directly on it. The things they’d shared, the way he’d trusted her-- the way _she_ trusted _him_ , he could have killed her a dozen times by now and there she was, presenting herself face-first, eyes closed, tired and vulnerable and wide fucking open, for him to do whatever he would in response.

But she hadn’t responded at all the way he’d thought she might, and now he felt, well, a great deal less sure of things. So here were the pathetic little scraps he had left to him of his former great love, more than two decades of his life and it was this little collection of things he’d borrowed or been given or accidentally stolen or packed up intending to return later, and she was doing something with them that involved magic.

He knew how to hold still in endless patience for hours on end but the serenity of meditation was well outside his grasp at the moment, and he fidgeted uneasily, rearranging position and accidentally knocking against another chair.

Keira blinked at him, gave him a dispassionate once-over, and before he could mutter an apology, flickered her fingers and made a little illusion pop up. It was like a map projected out into space, and showed-- well, part of the Continent, a delicate tracery of lines showing rivers and borders, little ragged dots for cities, and there was a small array of glowing things pulsing in a scatter across the map.

“I’ve isolated the resonance of his possession in these items here,” she said. “The one they all had in common that wasn’t yours. So these,” and she flicked her fingers at the map, “are other objects with this same resonance, that belonged to him for an extended enough period that it’s distinct.” She moved her hands, and the display rotated; moved her hands outward, and the display enlarged on one small area. “It will take a while, because many of these things would be, for example, shoes he wore but then sold on and someone else has been using since, or coins he carried a long time before spending, or the like.”

Lambert stared at the map, dumbfounded; so many of the contracts he’d worked had proven impossible for want of something like this. “What, you can just-- _find_ things,” he said.

“I can,” she said, without even a flicker of amusement at his dumbfoundedness. “It’s a fairly fundamental form. Magic lends itself very well to this sort of sympathetic resonance.”

She was letting him see, he could tell that; she had been doing this work before, but now was letting him watch her flick through the various glowing objects, enlarge them enough to get a sense of what they were, and then cast them aside when they proved to be nothing large enough to pursue.

“Hmph,” he said, “can you give me a cantrip for _that_? That’s the kind of thing I could use all the damn time.”

“It certainly helps for misplaced things,” she said, still a little distant as she kept working. “I don’t think I could distill _this_ down to a cantrip, not something this complex, but yes, I could probably give you a small location-spell cantrip that you could customize and use yourself. Not as easily as a Sign, but since we’ve proven that you do have spell-casting ability, I could likely make something like that.”

“He was murdered in Ellander,” Lambert said, watching the map. There was a cluster of objects in Ellander, close together.

“Good to know,” she said. “I was looking at the most far-flung, and working inward toward the center, which I had tentatively thought might be somewhere around there. I find it most useful to be methodical, to avoid reduplicating my own efforts.”

Lambert stared at the map. “Will this find his body,” he said, very quietly.

She glanced at him. “I don’t know,” she said. “Bodies have… a different resonance. It’s not-- it depends somewhat on the condition in which he was buried, or if he was cremated or-- or anything else. Buried with his swords, I will probably find the swords and thus him. Buried in new clothes or in a winding-sheet, no, not with this spell.”

Lambert didn’t know if he wanted her to. “Is there a spell that could?”

“Yes,” she said. She kept working as she considered that. “Provided he hasn’t been cremated. Best if you had-- something of _him_ , though, which can get awkward. Like, a lock of his hair, that’s something people sometimes have. Or, I mean, sometimes parents keep their children’s milk teeth, and that’s--”

“A tooth,” Lambert said. He did have one of Aiden’s teeth. Probably. He’d had three, in a jar, and had used two of the others in potions, but once he’d found out Aiden was dead he hadn’t been able to bear using the last one. The only issue was that he’d thrown a couple of his in there too, in the interim, and figuring out which one was Aiden’s would be slightly tricky.

That got Keira to pause and look directly at him. “You have one of his teeth,” she said. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I do, anyway.”

She stared blankly at him. “Why would you--”

Well, fuck. There were almost no Witchers left to be betrayed by this knowledge. And he’d told that fucking bard-- by accident, but still. “Our teeth grow back,” he said. “They fall out all the gods-damned time.”

“What the fuck,” she said quietly to herself.

“Potions tend to rot them,” Lambert said. “We get hit in the face a lot. It’s kind of a secret, because we don’t really want people, like, _harvesting_ them, but. They grow back.”

“And when they fall out, you keep them,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, “well, you don’t want to leave bits of yourself lying around, and whatnot.”

She considered that. “When I think about how much trouble I went through to replace the one tooth of mine that got knocked out at Thanedd,” she said, then shook her head. “Well, once I’ve finished this, I can try with the tooth, too.”

“Don’t overdo it,” Lambert said. “This is-- more important.”

He didn’t know what good a body would really do him, but. Maybe it would help him feel like it was real. Maybe it would make things worse. He didn’t know. He knew what a body looked like after almost three years. There wouldn’t be much to see. He really didn’t know if he wanted to. But maybe knowing where it was-- maybe that would bring him some peace.

Likely, nothing would bring any peace and that was how it was.

He knew precisely where Vesemir’s body was, and it hadn’t helped one fucking bit. But, well. He wasn’t thinking about that.

“Mm,” Keira said, and he refocused to see that she was examining a shape of a hilted object. “This isn’t a sword, I don’t think. Hard to get a precise sense of it but I think it’s a knife.”

“Yes,” Lambert said, recognizing the shape and proportions of it, “he kept that one at his back, normally.”

Keira’s eyes, catching green reflections from the illusion, considered him slowly, and she looked down and made a note on a scrap of paper she’d set aside. “I assume that one’s worth attempting to retrieve,” she said, as she wrote.

“Yes,” Lambert said, and it came out barely a breath.

Another hilted object. “That one was his boot knife,” Lambert said, recognizing the shape of it.

“Close by, but not immediately so,” Keira muttered.

“So they looted the body and split up what they found,” Lambert concluded.

“Maybe,” she said, “or the lot was sold at once, in a place where mostly locals bought it.”

“Been long enough that his clothes should be worn out, if someone bought them to use them,” Lambert said.

“Mm, fabric doesn’t hold the impression as long,” she said. “Metal, stone, those are the longest, then wood, leather…” She pulled up another object. “Just the hilt of a sword. Looks like at least one of his swords has been dismantled. A runestone set in it?”

Lambert could easily recognize the shape. “Steel sword,” he said. “He had… two or three runestones set in that thing.” He shook his head. “Wasn’t to my taste, that one, but he liked it. Cat style favors speed over strength but he was so tall it seemed stupid to waste his leverage like that.”

“Cat,” Keira said, and Lambert supposed he probably hadn’t mentioned Aiden’s actual school before now.

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s-- he was old enough to have been from before they… changed. He wasn’t like the ones calling themselves Cats now.” He shook his head a little. “That’s who killed him-- one of the new Cats. No loyalty, no sense of honor. He wasn’t like that, Keira.”

She gave him a long look, then went back to her work. “Should I note down the location of the hilt? Do you want to attempt to retrieve it?”

“No,” Lambert said, “not if it’s been dismantled.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We don’t-- have to--”

“Let’s see what we find before we make any real choices,” she said. “I’m just collecting information now, this isn’t much effort.”

“How’s your headache?” he asked gruffly.

“Fine,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done this if I weren’t strong enough for it.” She smiled slightly. ‘This isn’t that difficult, it just takes attention.” And she turned her focus back to it, and pulled up another object.

Lambert recognized the shape immediately. “Silver sword,” he said.

“Looks intact,” Keira said.

“His swords were both a couple inches shorter than mine,” Lambert said, “for the speed, and I just thought that was so dumb, but he had enough arm to make up for it.”

Keira rotated the shape of the sword, illusorily, and looked deeply contemplative. “I bet that one’s hanging on a wall,” she said.

“A trophy,” Lambert said, disgusted.

She shrugged, and focused again, and the next thing-- well, it was an indistinct small round-ish blob. “This one’s got an enormous amount of resonance,” she said.

“Medallion,” Lambert said. He didn’t have to really see it to know. The outlines of the chain were faint but present.

“Yes,” she said. She made a note. “Quite close to the sword. Probably in the possession of the same person.”

“Who is probably the one who put out the contract,” Lambert said, curling his lip.

Keira gestured, and the illusory map disappeared. She pulled over her scrap of paper and wrote down some notes. “It’s worth noting that over the last year or so, a large number of changes have taken place in the ruling class across the northern Continent, including in Ellander, and it’s likely the political landscape there is entirely different than it was when the contract was offered.”

“So maybe this guy’s got no power anymore,” Lambert said.

“Or maybe the man who did it is dead, and this is now decoration in someone else’s study,” Keira said.

“That’s oddly specific,” Lambert realized. “What could you see, from that?”

“I’ve been following the developments,” she said, “and I’m well aware that Nilfgaard installed a new government in Ellander. If your-- whoever, who put out the contract, was anyone of consequence, as he must have been if you have not gone on a vendetta to murder them all yet, then it is likely that he was killed or deposed or removed somehow, and his effects are now on display in someone else’s place of work. It will take a delicate hand to retrieve these, firstly to discover how the new owners are connected to the old, and secondly to convince them that these trophies were wrongly taken and must be restored to the family of the deceased.”

“Or,” Lambert said.

Keira fixed him with a steely glare. “Lambert,” she said. “We do this my way.”

“I was thinking we just take them when nobody’s looking,” Lambert said. “We don’t have to get the authorities involved.”

“I’d rather not start a whole mess,” Keira said. “If we just ask politely--”

“Asking politely’s only a good starting place if you’ve got reason to believe in the other participants’ good faith,” Lambert said. He tilted his head. “You just tell me where they are and I can handle it, you don’t have to waste any more of your time.” He didn’t say _it’s not really your business anyway_ because he couldn’t think of a way to say it that didn’t sound harsh, but it was true, she’d only done a kind thing by giving him information he needed. But she didn’t know Aiden at all and had no real connection to him. “It’s awfully nice of you to have involved yourself this far,” he tried.

She shook her head slightly. “Lambert, I don’t want you to get into trouble. This is a new situation; it’s not like the old days, where if you pissed someone off in Temeria you could just go over to Redania and no one would care. It’s all under Nilfgaard now, and they talk to one another.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Lambert said. “I’ve been a Witcher on the Path for eighty years. I’ve seen a lot of governments come and go and I generally get how they work.”

“Your job has been killing monsters,” Keira said, skeptical.

“Witcher contracts encompass all kinds of stuff,” Lambert said. “Not least of all talking to government officials.”

Keira gave him a long look, and then sighed. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll draw you a map and portal you there, and let you work out out on your own. I have a method I can use that will let you talk to me magically as well, so you can tell me when you’re ready to be transported back here. But let me suggest that you start by talking to someone about it.”

“Of course,” Lambert said.


	2. A Direct Method

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: panic attack, vomiting mention

It had taken Ciri a while to get them to let her practice her sword-forms. It wasn’t that Nilfgaardian women never studied combat arts, or pursued physical education; she was downright encouraged to ride, and no one minded her efforts to stay limber in the gymnasium. But specifically her, and specifically with a sword, seemed to be some sort of problem, and it had taken her a while to get any sort of dispensation to keep up with her studies.

She had in the meantime set up a kind of Gauntlet obstacle course, and it had been gratifying to watch the young officers’ eyes pop as she’d completed her final test run of it. It had taken forever, in her scant free time, but now it was there and the young officers had been making attempts at it and three of them had broken bones on it but by now most of them could do it, and felt themselves clever for it.

She was at sword-practice when she noticed one of her father’s aides waiting patiently. There was no hint of disapproval on his face, just a studied neutrality. She considered ignoring him, but then, they’d let her do this, finally. If there was some sort of problem, she should know in time to fix it. She paused, set her sword aside, and came over to wipe her face and take a drink. “Is there an issue?” she asked the aide.

“My lady had requested to be informed whenever there was any kind of dispute involving a Witcher,” the aide said, “and one of the message relays just turned up a complaint in Ellander.”

None of her Wolves were in Ellander, that she knew of, and winter was certainly settling in so none of them should be about, but she might as well hear it. “A complaint,” she said.

“A government official reports that a Witcher claimed to have a contract to retrieve some items that a previous office-holder had left behind,” the man said, “and that matters grew heated, and he has confined the Witcher to imprisonment.”

“What were these items?” Ciri wondered, and the man’s expression said the report had not included that information. “Did he say the Witcher’s name or affiliation?”

“Wolf school,” the aide said. “Lambert.”

“Lambert,” Ciri said, startled. He was safely ensconced in Kaedwen with that mage, she’d thought. Well, perhaps they hadn’t gotten along as well as she’d assumed they would. She sighed. “I’d better go.”

“Personally?” the aide said, revealing a trace of startled dismay. “Or--”

She waved a hand. “The way I travel, it’s not any particular hassle.”

“We have the message relay,” he said, “we can just get more information about the situation and then once we know what it is, you can send back your wishes. There’s no need to alarm anyone.”

Ciri picked up her sword and cleaned it off, then returned it to the sheath. “Or, I can just go, straighten it out, and come back,” she said.

From his face, that was not the correct choice, and he was going to run off and tattle to her father, so she sighed, and followed him back back to her office.

The message relay was something she’d had a hand in establishing, and she’d taken assistance from Yennefer; there were magical devices that non-users of magic could be taught to use, with proper assistance. The device consisted of a magical slate upon which the user would arrange runestones in the desired order to connect it with various other magical slates-- most of them were only configured to talk to the central one, but some had been configured to talk among themselves to facilitate local information exchange-- and once connected, one user could write with a magical stylus onto the slate, and the writing would appear on the other’s slate. When the send/receive runestone was inverted, the other could reply, and the writing would appear on the first slate. It was a bit limited but the users had already begun devising a complex shorthand that made it more efficient, and there was now a standard set of ideographs posted next to all the slates so that all users could refer to them.

So daily, or whenever anything of particular interest occurred (and there were lists of items that required instant reportage, disputes involving Witchers being the ninth or tenth item on the list), these depots would report in to the central messaging depot in Nilfgaard, and reports would be assembled. Mostly, Ciri read these, and had been rapidly learning which elements to pass along to Emhyr. Obviously, this was part of her studies, as she learned enough to take over at Emhyr’s promised abdication.

So they sent a message to the depot, and in a moment got a response back. Ciri had to consult the ideograph list. “A mage?” she said, startled.

“A mage has become involved in the proceedings,” the on-duty slate-writer translated.

“Ah, fuck,” Ciri said. She’d thought Keira sensible, but she obviously was the client employing Lambert to retrieve these items for her, and now that he’d been stymied, she was here to impose her will on the proceedings. This was not ideal. “Sorry,” she said to the aide, and Blinked directly into the Ellander message depot.

The slate-writer on duty there shrieked and fell out of his chair as she appeared, and the guard who’d been leaning in the door chatting with him scrambled backward and came up clutching his sword.

“Calm down, it’s just me,” Ciri said, whereupon both of them threw themselves to the floor.

All right, she saw the aide’s point. Turning up in person wasn’t the most graceful way to handle this. But, it was the most direct, and if Lambert got beheaded by some overzealous law-and-order type from her own government because she was trying to be polite, she’d never get over it, so this was the sensible course.

She abandoned trying to reassure them and strode out of the message office and out into the regional governor’s office, where the governor was standing with his hands on his hips looking annoyed as an underling made a report to him. The underling saw her first, and stared in confusion. The governor turned, and stared blankly.

“Excuse me,” he said, his tone shading a bit toward incredulity, “may I help you?”

She hadn’t met him before. It struck her that possibly, she _should_ have gone through the proper channels, here. Oh, boy, Emhyr was going to be so full of judgement about this, and he was going to be _right_ , and it was all going to be an insufferable Lesson. But, she made herself straighten.

“I am the Crown Princess Cirilla,” she said. “We received notice of an issue with a Witcher. That’s on the fast-notice checklist because I have a particular interest, and when I confirmed that it’s a Wolf Witcher you’re having trouble with, I decided to attend to it personally.”

The disbelief in his eyes shaded slowly to doubt and thence to resignation. “You are, aren’t you,” he said. He collected himself and made a correct bow, of approximately the suitable degree, no less. “Your Highness. Forgive my lack of a correct greeting.”

“Oh,” she said, and the practice had paid off enough that her responding gesture was automatically correct, at least, “I cannot blame you when my initial method of address to you was so unconventional.”

“The issue in question,” the governor said, with admirable directness, “is that the Witcher presented himself at the home of one of my deputies, and became rather… insistent, about the matter of some items he was certain were located within the home.”

“I came because I heard a report that there was a mage involved,” Ciri said. “In the current climate, I am extremely concerned about the conduct of mages.”

“I was getting around to that, Excellency,” the governor said. “We detained the Witcher, since he had become agitated. A short time later, a mage presented herself and said that the Witcher had been on an errand for her, and petitioned to be allowed to negotiate for his release.”

“So how did that go?” Ciri asked warily.

“Well,” he said. “I haven’t agreed to hear her suit, yet. I was consulting my registry of known mages to determine what we know of her. I had ascertained that she is formerly affiliated with the Lodge of Sorceresses, but had no more recent information about her.”

“Is it Keira Metz?” Ciri asked, and gestured to bring up an illusion with an image of the woman’s face, since she had mastered that and it seemed easiest. “Or is she using an illusion?”

The governor looked startled. “Why,” he said, “it is. How did you know?”

“She and the Witcher Lambert are known accomplices,” Ciri said, letting the illusion dissipate, and then realized the phrase sounded worse than she’d intended in Nilfgaardian. “I mean, they’ve both done me favors and I’m quite fond of him in particular, but if she’s getting him into trouble--”

“Ah,” the governor said. “Well, she’s waiting in the anteroom, and I can’t say as I would be sorry to have you here to help me unpick this situation. It’s possibly all just a misunderstanding but with Witchers and mages involved, it’s all rather above my normal areas of expertise.”

“Yes,” Ciri said, “that was what worried me as well, and led to my precipitous visit.”

“I don’t mind having some backup,” the governor said, a little grimly.

“My experience of Metz is that she is reasonable,” Ciri said, “but you are correct that she is of course extremely dangerous.” She smiled; it was nice to be out of the city for a moment. “However, so am I.”

“Of course, my lady,” the governor said, but rather than distaste, his expression held a reluctant amusement. Ciri counted it a victory.

* * *

It took a great deal of self-discipline for Keira not to shout _I fucking told you so_ over the magical two-way silent communication she’d set up with Lambert. She’d been restraining herself ever since she’d first realized the whole thing had gone wrong, and Lambert had gone through shouting furiously to a stormy silence now that he was mostly out of anyone’s earshot.

She was cooling her heels in the governor’s antechamber; her best show of charm was useless when it was transparently about an irate Witcher who had been threatening some sort of viscount or minor government official or other. This was stupid, and it was all down to her wanting so badly to do the right thing. Of course keeping a low profile meant she didn’t want to swan in here under her real name and kick up any kind of fuss, and of course it had made the most sense to just let Lambert take care of it, but of course-- of _course_ \-- he was too angry about the underlying tragedy to really keep his head, and she should have known, and she should have just-- used a spell, or an illusion, or just portaled into the house while no one was home and stolen the bloody medallion, but. It was too late.

She was going to get burned at a fucking stake, was what was going to happen, or so her mind kept shouting at her, and she had pulled herself together as best she could but there was only so much more of this she was going to put up with before she just magicked Lambert out of the jail cell they had him in and too bad that he’d be on a wanted list through all of Nilfgaard’s area of influence or whatever they were bloody calling it now, that was his lookout and he should’ve thought of that before deciding he could do this job.

Her reverie was interrupted by a door opening. (The bloody Nilfgaardians had anti-sorcery protections all over everything and she couldn’t even eavesdrop through the fucking door, it was ridiculous.) She glanced up, and blinked, and then stood at the sight of the woman coming out the door.

It was Cirilla, in, well, not very formal wear; it was a decent outfit with fitted trousers but they were trousers, which wasn’t very Nilfgaardian. She rather looked as though she’d been taking her exercise. “Keira,” she said.

“Cirilla,” Keira said, and then remembered, fuck, she was important, of course she was. “Er, your-- Excellency,” she amended.

Cirilla didn’t look particularly pleased; her smile was small and rather taut. “What sort of nonsense have you put my uncle up to?”

Well, honesty was likely to serve both. “I made the terrible mistake of locating Aiden’s medallion for him,” Keira said, a bit glumly. “You know how you can use the resonance imparted to an object by an individual’s long possession of it to locate that object? Well. I located Aiden’s medallion, which in itself wasn’t that stupid, but then Lambert said he would be just fine to retrieve it on his own, and I decided to let him. In hindsight, that was not my best decision.”

Cirilla closed her mouth firmly, and her face went into an expression that Keira couldn’t read. She turned to the Nilfgaardian standing just behind her, and said, “What items was he retrieving?”

“A silver sword,” the Nilfgaardian said, “and some sort of metalworked amulet.”

“A Witcher medallion,” Ciri said, eyebrows raised.

“Possibly,” the Nilfgaardian said.

She sighed, and turned back to Keira. “I see,” she said. Keira knew, then, that it was her own involvement that had made Cirilla turn up; she’d assumed Keira was using Lambert to get something magical or powerful in some way. _Fantastic_ , Keira thought, and tried very hard not to do the math on whether a fellow sorceress, as Ciri _sort of_ was, would have her executed just for being a mage.

To distract herself, she decided to be merciful, and sent through their connection to the despondent Lambert, _Your niece just turned up_.

_How does she look_? Lambert demanded, which was a slightly odd question.

_She looks like herself_ , Keira shot back. _I rather think she’s here because she expects this is my fault. Thanks for that_.

_Tell her to get me out of here_ , Lambert said.

_I’m not telling her to do anything_ , Keira answered him, _but I’m telling her what’s going on. Now leave me alone and let me talk. I’ll be there as soon as I can._ And she closed the connection.

“I didn’t intend to involve myself,” Keira said, “but I also thought I’d best provide portal transport, given the lateness of the season. So I was keeping tabs. I-- had been attempting to keep a low profile while things settle down, and I certainly did not intend to add to your workload, but I also couldn’t see my way to letting him stew in a jail cell down here when I’d already been silly enough to involve myself by locating the thing for him.”

“Did he just barge in and demand them?” Cirilla asked, though whether she were asking Keira or the Nilfgaardian, Keira wasn’t sure.

“I advised him to present himself to the new local government and enter negotiations that way,” Keira said, when the Nilfgaardian seemed to assume Cirilla had been talking to Keira, “but his idea of _keeping a low profile_ and mine are rather different.”

“Lambert doesn’t do low-profile,” Cirilla mused, and sighed. “Well, sir,” she said to the governor, “I’m afraid I recognize the objects in question and must confirm, he does have a legitimate right to them, they belong to a comrade who was murdered under the previous regime. I believe I know enough of the details myself that I can fill in the paperwork and save us all a massive headache on that.”

“I see,” the governor said. “Very good, Excellency.” His face was impossible to read. It was a long time since anyone had reacted to Keira like that. She didn’t entirely miss it, except the part where she’d been able to be confident about not being burned at the stake on a moment’s notice. Though, as it happened, that had been false confidence the whole time; she’d always only been a hand-tip away from that sort of thing. All security was false.

The place Lambert was being held was a short, walkable distance, and the governor dispatched one of his aides to come along with them when Cirilla insisted he did not have to attend personally. The aide walked a few paces ahead, leading the way, and Cirilla addressed herself to Keira as they walked.

“I’d heard Lambert was wintering up your way. Eskel said he thought you two might winter together, though Lambert had seemed uncertain about it,” she said.

Keira was too well-schooled to fidget, but she had her hands folded into the ends of her sleeves. She was dressed in what now felt like a costume, layers of illusion to give herself her customary appearance, and a sturdy and practical coat over the top with an illusion on it to give her at least some of the dramatic cleavage and ornamented aspect that went along with her usual look. She hadn’t managed to come up with a new look yet, but had figured an element of concession to the season wouldn’t go amiss in her halfhearted attempt at being low-profile.

“I can’t think why he’d have been uncertain,” Keira said. “It’s his house, the village alderman gave it to him in gratitude for solving the wraith problem, and I think some other work. He helped me move in there and said I could stay, but the fact remains that it’s his house.”

“He can be… a bit of an intense companion, sometimes,” Cirilla said.

“He’s been nothing but kind to me,” Keira said, “which is why I was so willing to just let him embark upon this expedition and take him at his word that he’d be fine on his own.” She sighed.

“Most people wouldn’t describe Lambert as _kind_ ,” Cirilla said. “But he was kind to me, as well, in his way.” She gave Kiera a thoughtful sidelong look.

They said no more on the walk, and Keira stayed out of the way as Cirilla went to deal with the paperwork and reunite with Lambert. She could overhear enough to recognize Lambert’s voice, and she glanced in through the door in time to see Lambert and Ciri embracing one another.

She kept herself quiet and unobtrusive as they walked back to the governor’s office, and Ciri and Lambert chatted delightedly.

He was so clearly happy to see Cirilla, and Keira found that she was unexpectedly jealous. Not sexually jealous; obviously Lambert and Ciri didn’t have that sort of relationship, and their body language bore that out. No: it was just that they were family, and Keira had no such thing, and never really had. It wasn’t inappropriate for her to be jealous of that, really. So she sighed quietly to herself, and kept her expression distant and mysterious and kept her illusions up but with a little gloss of look-away-nothing-to-see-here over the top of them so that ideally, nobody would remember she was there, and she could slink back off into hiding again after it was done. She hadn’t been prepared to re-enter society and make herself known to the new government, and she was rationally fairly reasonably confident that she wouldn’t get hauled off and burned at the stake for it now, but the part of her brain scarred by living in terror for so long kept squeaking at her that the dimeritium shackles would come out at any moment, and it was hard for her not to just… step out of view and portal out and hide somewhere.

Back at the governor’s office, the lower government official who’d been put up in the former home of the now-deceased noble who’d ordered the contract on Aiden had been summoned and had brought the sword and, likely, also the medallion, and Cirilla stepped in and was handling the situation but then turned to Keira. “Could you,” she said, “go over the paperwork here, and see what it says? This is apparently the details of the contract on Aiden, I don’t want Lambert to read that.”

“Of course,” Keira said, and she could see that Cirilla was having Lambert look at the items and Lambert was doing not a great job of holding himself together but he was trying at least, and that seemed adequate for the situation. His face had gone terribly blank and his hands were shaking as he looked at the runestones in the sword and pronounced the item authentic.

The contract was spare and minimal and explained nothing, but there it was; the hit on Aiden had been legal by the then-law of the land.

“I thought Witchers didn’t have feelings,” the lower government official was saying quietly to the governor, in Nilfgaardian. Keira stared at them but then remembered she was trying to be unobtrusive, so she got herself back under control and reported back to Cirilla about the contract.

“All is in order,” Cirilla said to the governor, solemnly. “I will compile a report for your records on this incident, and send it along. Before we break up this meeting, were there any items you wanted to bring directly to my attention? I apologize for this whole disruption, but the least I can do in return is take a look at any outstanding concerns you have that have gone unanswered.”

Keira went and stood at Lambert’s elbow. He had Aiden’s medallion in his hand and was watching Cirilla instead of staring at it. Aiden’s sword, now that Keira saw it in person, was in a battered scabbard, and Lambert had affixed it to one of his sword belts so that now he was carrying three swords.

He didn’t notice her, possibly because of her look-away illusions, so she very gently touched the outside of his arm. He blinked, and glanced over at her, did a double-take, and gave her a wry, strained smile. “I tried,” he said, a little defensive.

“I’m not angry,” she murmured. “Provided they let us leave.”

They did. It was only a few moments longer, and then the governor and his aide were leaving and Cirilla pulled Lambert aside and they spoke, low and intense, for a few moments, standing close together. Lambert was wiping his eyes, gesturing slightly with the medallion. Keira stayed still, composed, letting her look-away illusions stay in position around her, working on settling the little part in her midsection that was still vividly imagining soldiers bursting in with dimeritium shackles, and all the things she knew would come after that.

Her heart wouldn’t stop racing, but she could reassure herself that her illusions were in place, and she looked bland and mysterious and simultaneously somehow uninteresting, just part of the scenery of this splendid room where a powerful man would make decisions.

After a few moments, however, Cirilla glanced around, and her eyes slid across Keira and then backtracked and found her. “Ah,” she said, and shook her head slightly, frowning. But she dismissed it. “There you are.”

“Here I am,” Keira said lightly, smiling, doing her absolute best to conceal the way her heart clenched with terror at being noticed. _Do not_ , she told herself firmly, _break and run, they will chase_. Her heart was beating hard enough that her vision was graying out a little at the corners. She did not want to be in this room, she did not want to be looked at or noticed, she wanted to go somewhere safe and not be looked at. She sighed, and tried to make it sound light-hearted instead of what it was, which was a desperate gasp to catch her breath against panic. “What’s the prognosis? Are we going to be allowed to go free, or are you taking Lambert with you instead?” She made her grin as cheeky as she could manage. “Has he been naughty and needs closer supervision?”

“Oh,” Cirilla said, looking at Lambert. “I mean, if you want, there’s always a place for you with me. Geralt promised he’d visit sometime.”

Lambert looked startled, and gave Keira a look, and then frowned at her. Fuck, he could probably hear her heartbeat; illusions wouldn’t disguise that. She tried to unobtrusively take slow, deep breaths; she’d a lot of practice at trying to calm herself, these last few years. “I will come visit sometime,” he said, “but I think we’re-- I thought we were doing all right.”

Keira tilted her head. “I’d be lonely if you left,” she said, “but I’d understand.”

“No, no, come later,” Cirilla said. “Then I’ll have something to look forward to.” Then she drew closer to him and murmured directly into his ear. Keira politely looked away, taking the opportunity to work on her breathing again, trying to calm herself.

Lambert laughed softly, but it wasn’t a mean laugh-- well, maybe it was, maybe Keira wouldn’t know, but she wasn’t going to think about it. No. And then he came over to her.

“I’ve got to get back,” Cirilla said. “But remember that, all right?”

“Of course,” Lambert said.

“Then we’re done here as well?” Keira asked, forgetting to make her voice light; it came out sharper than she’d intended.

“Yes,” Cirilla said, and smiled, then opened a portal. Keira did too, because there was no fucking way she was getting stuck here.

Lambert came through right behind her and she gestured it away. She’d brought them to the little yard between the house and the barn, with the garden around them. As soon as the portal vanished she stumbled off to one side and was sick.

“Shit,” Lambert said in surprise, skipping away a little bit. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said, and gagged, but the worst was over. She swallowed hard, breathed for a moment, and then straightened up, wiping her mouth. “I’m fine,” she said again, when she had enough breath not to wobble as she said it.

“What,” Lambert said, completely taken aback. “What happened? I could hear, back there, your heart was going like-- did the governor do something to you?”

“No,” Keira said, and walked to the house, arms folded tightly and head held up. “I said, I’m fine.”

There was no way she was going to explain to him that she’d been frightened of that governor, had been afraid like a little child-- it was stupid, and she was fine, and it was done now.

He gave up, after a few more tries, and she withdrew to her workshop and left him to enjoy his new treasures, such as they were.


	3. Various Little Breakdowns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings mostly for various aspects of panic attack / night terrors / grief situations.

Aiden’s medallion wasn’t really any kind of comfort, but Lambert hadn’t expected it to be, really. He’d just-- had to have it, and having it now was-- it was so substantial, and undeniable, and final. That was it-- there was something so _final_ about it. It felt real, now. And it was absolutely Aiden’s; he’d had a rough spot on the back from an irregularity in the casting, and a nick on the front from some long ago fight, and Lambert had touched it enough to be instinctively familiar with what it felt like. It had almost always felt warm, when Aiden wore it, because he’d usually worn it inside his gambeson, between the leather of his outer layer and the linen of the inner layers of his clothing, and his body had almost always warmed it. 

It warmed a bit between Lambert’s fingers, but it was mostly cold, and dead. 

It had been cleaned, and there was no dirt or blood on it. Some of its customary patina was even scrubbed away.

The sword was in similar condition; it was worn, and had needed resilvering, though not urgently, but it had been carefully cleaned and oiled before going on display with the battered scabbard hung next to it. The scabbard had been cleaned as well, and was cleaner than it ever had been when Aiden had worn it.

So, of course, they smelled like the house of the Nilfgaardian government official, and before that, the minor noble who’d lived there. There was nothing familiar in the scent. There was nothing to smell. 

Lambert let himself wallow anyway, for a little bit, but it was maudlin and unproductive and he had to wonder, instead, what was wrong with Keira. 

She’d seemed only moderately annoyed with him when she’d had to come rescue him, but then he only knew that because of her tone of voice over the widget thing she’d been using to communicate with him silently. It was possible she’d been more upset than she’d let on. It had been eerie, when he’d been talking to Ciri and she’d been wandering around looking vaguely regal under her layers of cosmetic illusions, and then he’d stepped close enough to hear that her heart was racing, and to smell that she was terrified. 

Had she been afraid the whole time? Or had the governor said or done something to her? Nothing that Ciri had been aware of, certainly, but Keira had been alone there for some time. She was stonewalling now, refusing to talk about any of it, but he had to know what had made her so frightened. If nothing else, he had to tell Ciri something was wrong with that governor; Ciri clearly was relying on him, as an official in her government. 

He spent a few more moments running his fingers along the chain of Aiden’s medallion. That was the chain he’d always worn, Lambert recognized it-- well, he’d replaced it at some point, maybe ten-fifteen years ago, and this was that one, with good heavy twisted links. It hadn’t been broken; the medallion had been removed over the head. Or, the head had been cut off. Either way, it was clean now, with no damage, and no trace of what had happened to the neck it had encircled.

He put the chain over his own head and let it hang next to his own medallion. He should string them together on a single chain, but he wasn’t ready to do that yet. 

Not yet.

He set the sword aside, and went out into the main room, and cooked a meal, really letting himself get absorbed in it and take his time, and when it was done and Keira still hadn’t come out of her workroom, he went in. There weren’t wards on the door, he didn’t think, but he still hesitated, half-expecting some objection. But nothing stopped him.

She was deeply absorbed in something largely invisible to him, her hands outstretched and her face moderately scrunched in concentration as she stood over her worktable and stared at a jar. 

He waited a few moments, his medallion buzzing slightly. Aiden’s hummed more faintly, and he was distracted enough wondering why that was until suddenly both medallions pulsed sharply, and Keira made a quiet grunting noise of effort.

He looked at her, and she had her face scrunched up, and then slowly her expression slackened, her eyes opened, and she blinked at him without recognition for a moment. Then she shook her head slightly, her gaze clearing, and said, “Oh, hello.”

“Hi,” he said. She’d looked briefly pleased to see him, but now her expression had settled back into neutrality. “Food’s getting cold.”

Her brows pinched together for an instant, and then she looked cool and calm. She still had all her illusions on from earlier, and she looked almost unfamiliar in her icy smooth perfection; he hadn’t realized how accustomed he’d grown to her real face, her freckles and the little burn scars here and there and the tiny fine lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. 

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

“I made pierogi,” he said, astonished at how hurt he felt. She’d never rejected his cooking before, and he’d spent a damn long time on them just now. Maybe she was ill? But no, she’d thrown up out of terror, before; he knew how that worked and it was unmistakable. Also did mages get sick? He didn’t think so, not more than Witchers did. 

“Oh,” she said. “Well, I--” She looked contrite. “I’m not feeling well. But I’ll-- come and sit with you, at least.” She stood, shaking out her skirts-- she was in layers of skirts, and Lambert had assumed they were an illusion but she wouldn’t have to shake out an illusion-- and followed him out into the main room. 

He took her hand in his, and she let him, as they walked. He stood for a moment with her close to him, and nerved himself up a bit. “What happened?” he asked. “Did the governor threaten you?”

“No,” she said, closed-off and cool. 

He brought his hand up tentatively, and when she didn’t shake him off, he cradled the side of her face, letting his last two fingertips stroke down her neck to where her pulse beat. It was steady enough now, a little fast, but not excessively so; sometimes using magic seemed to make her exert herself, as if it were physical exercise. She ought to eat more to make up for it, but didn’t. “Something had you pretty rattled,” he said. “You hid it really well but I could hear your heart, sweetheart. What happened?”

“In the end,” she said, “nothing happened, so it’s fine, and I was upset over nothing. It’s all right, I’m glad to have been proven wrong.”

He traced his thumb over one of the tiny burn scars on her cheek, a little pockmark that was invisible under her illusions. Her skin looked like porcelain, her eyelashes dark and unnaturally long, her eyebrows so perfect they didn’t really look like hair even from this close perspective. 

He missed her real face, but he wasn’t going to ask her to change for him. 

“Okay,” he said. “Well, if you want, you can stick a preserving charm on some of these and eat them later when your stomach’s settled.”

She smiled at him, one of the real ones where she didn’t look like she’d practiced it, like it had surprised her, and he missed the way her real skin moved beside her mouth when she did that. “All right,” she said, “I’ll do that.”

* * *

Lambert jerked awake, bolting upright before he’d identified where he was or what had woken him. Aiden’s medallion clunked against his, and he grabbed them both with his hand, needing to feel whether either one had vibrated. No; no warning of danger-- both were just warm from his body, no extra heat of warning, there. 

He was in his bed, in the bedroom of the farmhouse, where Keira-- 

He heard it again, the sound that had woken him-- Keira screamed, muffled through doors, not a full-voice scream but a choked one of terror, as if she were being attacked. 

Lambert leapt out of bed, grabbing a long knife from by the door, and was out in the main room quicker than thought. Keira’s scream had choked off into a strangled noise and now she was sobbing, horrible choked sobs as if she were dying. But the sound wasn’t coming from her bedroom; she was in her workshop.

He hesitated a bare instant, feeling for wards on the door, listening for any sounds of whatever attack had prompted this, and there was nothing, so he pushed in cautiously. 

It was dim, only a single lamp guttering on the verge of going out, and Keira was on the floor in the corner of the room, and she was alone. There was nothing else in the room, except the things that were normally there, the furniture and accoutrements and such. 

“Keira,” he said: she was still sobbing, nearly strangling on it. It was among the worst sounds he’d ever heard, and he’d heard a lot of things. “Keira! Keira, what happened?”

She didn’t really react to him. He dropped to his knees, put the knife down carefully within reach but out of flailing range, and crawled a little closer to her, carefully touching her arm. She was still dressed in the day’s clothes but her illusions were gone, and she was hunched in a little heap on the floor. 

She whipped her head around to look at him as he touched her, wild-eyed, and screamed again, a horrible half-choked hoarse noise; she recoiled from him as if terrified, and slammed herself into the wall, scrabbling blindly at it and the floor as if she’d dig her way out. He realized in horror that her hands were bloody, and from the smell it was her own blood. “Keira!” he said. “Keira, it’s me, it’s Lambert, what happened?”

She was hurting herself, tearing her nails as she clawed at the wall and the floor, and he had to stop her. He grabbed her hands and pulled them in, pressed them against her body, and bear-hugged her arms to her body so she couldn’t hurt herself fighting him. “Keira,” he said, gentle, into her ear, “Keira, it’s me, I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you.”

She struggled for a moment, but then the resistance went out of her all at once and she went limp in his arms, sobbing. “No,” she sobbed. “No.”

“Was it a nightmare?” he asked. He genuinely couldn’t see any evidence of anything having happened in the room, no sign of any intruder either physical or magical. All of the things on her workbench were idle, nothing lit, nothing actively brewing. It seemed likely she’d nodded off making notes. Some glassware was smashed but it looked like it had happened when she’d flailed herself half-awake. It had to be a night terror or something internal; there was no external danger in this room, no active magic, nothing threatening anyone’s safety. 

She sobbed so hard she gagged, and he held her tighter, not squeezing her but making it so she could not move her arms at all, letting her breathe. “Keira,” he said, “Keira, shh, breathe. Breathe. Breathe with me. Can you hear me?”

It took a while, and she kept sobbing, limp in his arms, but after a while where he kept talking softly and breathing in exaggerated deep slow breaths, she started mirroring him, and her sobs quieted and became just tears. 

“That’s it,” he said, calm and gentle and encouraging, “that’s it, breathe with me, sweetheart. That’s it.”

The lamp had gone out by then, and he’d had time, in the soft darkness, to remember the way her heart had been pounding like a rabbit’s in the governor’s house, and he’d had time to push that memory into the part of his brain where he analyzed stuff, and crunch through the fact that most of Keira’s friends were dead at the hands of a mad authoritarian, and maybe draw a conclusion about what had frightened her so badly. 

“Can I let go of your hands?” he said quietly. “Can I just hold you? Would that be all right?”

She nodded weakly, and he let go of her arms. She brought her hands up to her face, wiping away snot and getting blood all over herself.

“Ach,” he said, “you’re a mess, let me--” but he didn’t have a handkerchief. He didn’t have a shirt. He wasn’t wearing anything but underwear. 

Tiredly, she gestured, and summoned a handkerchief with a little flicker of magic that wrecked Lambert’s night vision for a moment. It didn’t matter; he re-dilated his pupils himself. He took it and wiped her face carefully, then gently cleaned her hands, seeing if any glass was still in the cuts. It wasn’t, so he let her wrap her hands in the handkerchief, and pulled her face gently into his shoulder. 

She was still weeping, nearly exhausted, and he rocked a little with her, stroking her back. “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re safe here. Just breathe with me a bit longer and then we can go get you cleaned up.”

“I’m f-fine,” she attempted, and slid off into quiet sobs again. He hushed her gently, and she subsided, after a little longer. 

This was the cost, he reflected; she’d let him go alone because she’d known she didn’t want to put herself into the hands of anyone powerful, and then he’d fucked up because he hadn’t really worried about it mattering and he’d let himself get mad about something nobody could fix and maybe, you know, maybe he’d been upset enough that he’d been over that line of not really caring what happened to himself anyway, and so she’d had to get involved, and this was what it had cost. This, and also she didn’t trust him now, hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him what her real concern was.

“It’s a while since I worked with anybody,” Lambert admitted. “I never was very good at it. I didn’t think about what you were going to have to go through to get me out of trouble.”

She sobbed, but she was so tired now it wasn’t very strong, and she subsided again in a moment. He didn’t say anything else for a while, and she went more and more limp, and finally he realized she was asleep. She’d just passed right out, leaning on him.

So he carefully gathered her up, and carried her into her bedroom, and put her on her bed. He left here there to go build her a fire, since there wasn’t one in the room and it was chilly. 

He came back with a basin of water he’d warmed with _Igni_ , and a cloth, and he carefully cleaned the cuts on her fingers. It woke her, but she recognized him and where she was and lay quietly. 

“Sorry,” he murmured. “I just wanted to really make sure there’s no glass in there.”

“Mm,” she said, and stretched, and used her other hand to rub her face.

He could see now that her face was bruised where she’d hit the wall. He grimly wiped away smears of blood where she’d bled on herself. She looked awful, bruised and sick and exhausted. And he knew the bodice she was wearing was boned, and had to be uncomfortable. “Can we get you into something you can sleep in?” he asked. 

She blinked muzzily at him. “Mm,” she said. But she moved her arms, tilted her head back in a way that seemed to invite him to unfasten the bodice, so he did. She did have a shift on underneath, a very low-cut one, but it would serve as a sleep shirt. He tugged her upright, and she sat up and leaned against his shoulder. 

She let him peel the bodice off her arms, and then he just held her for a moment. She tucked her face against his shoulder, and he rubbed her back. After a moment, he took her damaged hands in his, and spent a moment very carefully shaping the Sign she’d taught him before casting it over them to close up the cuts and fix her torn nails. 

She gasped a little, and blinked at him, then subsided, and he looked and ascertained that it had worked. On impulse, he took one of her hands in his and kissed it. “I’m gonna stay here with you, okay?”

She nodded, and then wriggled out of her various layers of skirts, shoved them off the side of the bed, and got herself under the blankets. He let her tuck herself up against him, and lay there a long time after she’d gone to sleep.

When she woke, it was still a bit before dawn, and the light was gray around the edges of the heavy curtains. She didn’t give much sign of being awake, but her breathing changed, and after a while she traced her finger around the edge of one of the medallions he was wearing. He couldn’t actually tell which medallion it was, his own or Aiden’s. 

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Lambert made himself say, because while he wasn’t sure he really could have done other than he had, and probably he’d’ve been fine without her getting involved, he couldn’t blame her for jumping in.

“It’s fine,” she said. “It all worked out. Though possibly you should check in with Cirilla and discover what harm it’s done her.”

“I will,” he said. “But at the moment I’m concerned with the harm it did you. I didn’t expect that and I’m sorry.”

She sighed. “That’s not you,” she said. “I always-- that’s just-- that just happens.”

“I’m not so dumb I can’t put together you spending half the day feeling trapped and terrified with you later having night terrors,” Lambert said. “I shouldn’t’ve put you in that position, and I was wrong and you were right.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and then she said, “I don’t really have precognition but I studied it, and I know that I-- Radovid was supposed to kill me.”

“Supposed to,” Lambert said.

“After I came to Kaer Morhen I started having dreams about it,” she said, and he could feel her shifting around. She came to rest with her hand over her midsection. “Really vivid.”

“He was gonna burn you at the stake, huh,” Lambert said.

“Impalement,” Keira said into his shoulder, and the position of her hand made more sense now.

“But he’s dead,” Lambert said.

“He is,” she whispered. 

“So it’s not going to happen now,” he said. It struck him then, the circumstances-- “Fucking Geralt, he saved you, didn’t he.”

“He’s got an odd relationship with Destiny,” Keira whispered. “It’s not that he did anything, but Destiny-- warps around him, sometimes.”

“That’s fucked-up,” Lambert said.

She didn’t say anything for a long moment, but then said, “I think it might warp around you too, sometimes.”

“No thanks,” Lambert said. “Destiny can keep its nasty fuckin’ paws off me.”

She laughed. “She doesn’t let anyone go,” she said. “That’s not how it works. So Radovid didn’t impale me, so I was spared to do something else, and now I don’t know where Destiny wants me, but I know I have to do something. I was spared for something. Maybe it was just saving you from the Wild Hunt, maybe that was it, and then…” She shivered. “Maybe I’m still going to get impaled somewhere. That’s what I--” She stopped talking, voice going thin, and he could feel her holding in a sob. 

“It’s all right,” he said, though really, it was a dumb thing to say.

She sobbed out loud. “I know what it feels like, now,” she said, and he held her tighter as she sobbed into his shoulder. “I’m not-- it’s not that I’m afraid of pain but-- oh Gods, Mother preserve me, I don’t-- I don’t want to die like that.” 

Unfortunately, Lambert was well aware that impalement was a much worse death than burning, provided the burning was done competently. Impalement was usually done so that death would be slow. It was a horrible way to go. He’d been impaled a time or two, fortunately never quite fatally, and he could imagine without access to advanced healing it was a lot worse. The pain was bad but the horror was really the worst part. 

He wanted, very badly, to promise he’d save her. But who was he? What could he do? And did she want that? He’d tried telling her before about his feelings and she hadn’t reacted well. He didn’t think she wanted promises or platitudes now. 

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I really am.” 

She cried quietly against his shoulder for a little bit, her breath hitching softly, but then got herself under control, and wiped her eyes on the sheets. “Well,” she said, “there’s little enough I can do about it, and even less you can do about it, so there’s no point dwelling on it.”

He kissed the top of her head. “I mean,” he said, “of course, if I can do anything to prevent you getting impaled, I’ll do that. I’m just only one person and not terribly powerful.” He sighed. “But I’ll be more careful about not putting myself in risky situations that I then expect you to haul me out of.”

“Well,” she said. “I couldn’t _leave_ you there.”

“I appreciate that you didn’t,” he said. 

She took a last deep breath, most of the hitching gone from it, and then pushed away from him, sitting up and wiping her face. “Well,” she said. “Give me that tooth. Let’s find his body.”

Lambert looked at her for a long moment. Her illusions had vanished in her sleep, and she looked tired and puffy-eyed and yet despite that gaunt-faced and pinched in a way that made him ache to feed her. 

“You don’t have to find his body,” he said. “It’s not-- this was enough.”

“I want to,” she said, mouth set stubbornly. 

He was silent a moment, and finally said, “Breakfast first.”

She lit up slightly. “You really did make me pierogi yesterday, didn’t you?”

“You can eat them for breakfast,” he said.

She clapped her hands in delight, and he felt a great deal better about the world as she hopped out of bed and went to find her house shoes.

* * *

In the cheerful light of morning, yesterday’s labors of making elaborate dumplings did not seem so silly. There was enough that Keira shared the leftovers with Lambert, and she perked up cheerfully once she’d eaten, her color improving and her mood all over much better. 

He didn’t feel quite so bad about handing over the little jar of teeth. “I can’t remember which one is his,” he said. 

She dumped out the three teeth and arranged them across her work surface, frowning slightly. He couldn’t see what she was doing, but his medallions were both buzzing faintly. That took some getting used to. Maybe he shouldn’t wear two at once, but he couldn’t bear to take Aiden’s off, now that he had it. It felt slightly different from his own, and he could tell which was which just from the feel of how they responded to threats and spells. 

“This one,” she said, selecting the rightmost tooth. “This one is not yours.” And she dumped the other two back into the jar. “I won’t ask why you keep them.”

“Would you just leave teeth lying around, if you shed them?” he asked, cagey, and she shrugged. 

“Likely no,” she said, “though it depends on the circumstances of the shedding, really.” But then her expression went canny. “What sort of… alchemical properties…”

“Please do not discuss harvesting my teeth and using them in potions,” Lambert said, knowing that while Vesemir wasn’t around to object anymore, the others were, and he could not be the one to reveal the secret.

She laughed. “Like one of your monsters!” she said. “Is it… ah, is it chimera teeth you use as a stabilizer?”

“Couldn’t say,” Lambert said. “Trade secret.” It was; in all written formulations, Witchers understood that if you used a Witcher tooth, you would encode it as being a chimera tooth, for safety. There were far more impenetrable codes than that wrapped around everything Lambert had ever committed to writing, but even in cipher he still encoded it as chimera teeth. If Keira had heard the phrase, she’d been reading Witcher potion formularies. 

Well, she probably _had_. 

“I’ve never had any luck with chimera teeth,” she said. He really didn’t think she knew how close she was, but then, he was concentrating so hard on not reacting that it was difficult to analyze her. “I must be doing it wrong. At any rate,” and she picked up the tooth in her hand, turning it over to look at it from every angle. “Hm, there isn’t much wear on this. How often do you lose your teeth?”

“Enough,” Lambert said. “How do you keep yours from wearing?”

She laughed. “Magic,” she said, “but you have to remember to renew the spells. And I have a false tooth implanted, where I got one knocked out in a fight.” 

“Which one?” he asked.

She laughed again. “You can look later,” she said, “and try and guess.”

“That sounds fun,” he said, curling his lip in mock-distaste. 

She rolled her eyes at him, amused, and then her expression went a little distant as she returned her focus to the tooth sitting on the work table. Something in Lambert’s chest tightened, then dropped away, and he found himself gripping the edge of the worktable tightly and staring at the innocuous little lump of white that was Aiden’s tooth.

That was Aiden’s tooth, that was a remnant of Aiden’s body. Aiden had been a person, with a body, with a physical presence, and he was gone now, and Lambert had thought of it before but it hit him like a physical blow out of nowhere now, and he hung onto that table and stared fixedly at that little lump of white.

It was a bicuspid tooth, the one just behind the canines-- a lower one, Aiden had caught a hard hit to the jaw from a water hag on one of those endless unrewarding slogs through a marginal swampland where the contract was for something else entirely but you had to get through there to get to the main objective. They’d made it to high ground by nightfall and had set up camp and washed up, and only then had Aiden probed his bleeding mouth and pulled out a couple of his badly-loosened teeth with a dry quip about stocking up on porridge next time they were in town. Lambert had been ready with the jar, so he’d been the one to wipe them off and keep them, and it had been a couple of days before Aiden’s mouth had felt well enough for kissing. 

It wasn’t the last time they’d been together but it was close to the last time. 

Keira was intent on her task now, absorbed. This wasn’t like the location spell for the medallion, there wasn’t an illusory map or anything. There was nothing to see. She had her hands set in strange fixed positions and was gazing distantly at nothing with all of her attention. 

Lambert’s vision went grainy and he realized he hadn’t been breathing, for a while. He let go of the table, stepped back a few paces, and then turned away, trying to compose himself. 

It wasn’t that Witchers didn’t have emotions, but they really were supposed to be good at controlling them. He’d had that schooled into him pretty early and he was supposed to be better than this and he’d been falling apart all over the place for days now. He needed to get himself under control.

He went to the corner of the room and knelt down and tried to meditate, but all he could think about was the spell Keira was doing. It was buzzing both medallions, so even if he’d managed to clear his mind, he wouldn’t be able to ignore it.

Finally he stood and went back over to the table. Keira had her head tilted to one side, her hands still crooked as if she were manipulating invisible strings, as if magic were an invisible fingerloop braid with an unimaginably complex pattern. 

She blinked and looked at him. “This one’s not as simple as the location spell,” she said.

“I don’t want you to find him,” Lambert blurted out. So much for having himself under better control. 

She nodded slightly. “I understand that,” she said. 

“I really,” he said, struggling to think before he spoke. But he couldn’t put it into words, the way he felt. “I don’t-- I don’t want to know,” he finished, sort of feebly.

“Completely understandable,” she said. She raised her hands and made a gesture somewhat like tying off a knot. “Let’s-- I’ll just bind all that up together and let it settle out.” His medallions buzzed a little more strongly, and then it faded to a dull background warmth as she pulled her hands away, and set them flat on the table. 

Lambert stared at the tooth, surrounded as it now palpably was by the invisible lines of a spell. He wanted to reach his hand in and grab it and pull it out. But, more strongly, he wanted to touch the face that tooth used to be in, that now was-- probably they’d taken Aiden’s head as a trophy, and sometimes you got the jaw too when you did that and sometimes the jaw fell off and it depended on--

“Lambert,” Keira said, her voice sharp, and she came around the table and caught him by the shoulders. “Lambert,” she said, softer. “It’s all right. Sit down.”

There was a chair, and he sat in it, and he put his hands out blindly and she caught them and then came and sat on his lap, across his lap, putting her arms around him and pulling his face against her shoulder. 

He wasn’t crying, he was just shaking. “I don’t,” he said.

“Shh,” she said, one hand firm across the back of his shoulder, the other soft at the junction of his hair and his neck. “It’s all right. Just breathe, yeah?”

He did, he just breathed. A part of him thought with grim humor about how the entire relationship he had with Keira was just them holding one another through various little breakdowns. He should keep score, figure out which of them was leading in the race to be the biggest disaster.

He genuinely didn’t know if she’d lost someone like Aiden, though. She clearly was broken by something, had obviously lost a lot of friends to Radovid’s depredations, had surely lived through other things like that-- and Aretuza was gone now, all the students dead-- possibly, she was in a similar state to the one Lambert had found himself in after the pogrom at Kaer Morhen. That was reasonable. But he should find out, he should ask her-- he didn’t even know about her previous lovers, if there’d been anyone like Aiden had been for him, if it would have been a man or a woman or what-- he was spilling his guts all over and she wasn’t doing the same. 

Which, really, was on him, and not on her at all, but he could at least ask. 

But-- he’d tried to tell her how he felt about her and she hadn’t reacted well and maybe that was why, maybe there was someone she wasn’t ready to move past yet-- and he didn’t want to blunder headfirst into that. If she wanted to tell him, she’d tell him; he’d opened himself up for it enough, surely, and it had to be up to her, or he was just going to keep ramming into her hurt places and not ever give her a chance. 

“Tell you what,” she murmured. “I’ll let this spell run, I’ll go see what’s there. I won’t tell you what I find until after I’m done checking everything over. If it’s something it would help you to see, I’ll show you. If it’s not, I’ll fix it, and then show you.”

“No,” Lambert said, and he fought down a spiky, angry response. “No, I need to--”

She sighed, and pulled his head back against her shoulder. “All right,” she said. “But I’ll go first and see what’s there.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. He shouldn’t cede that to her but he also-- well, she could always just do it and not tell him. “Fuck,” he said. “I don’t want to know but I can’t not.”

She kissed the top of his head. “Let me,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Thanksgiving, however it may find you, if that's something you celebrate, and if not, well, _I'm_ thankful for you, anyway.


	4. Need Or Want

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This concludes the story but the next story is coming soon and is actually the entire reason I started this series so sit tight and check back. 
> 
> Warnings: mild gore

Ciri leaned in the doorway, knowing it would annoy Emhyr. His jaw tightened minutely but he did not outwardly react, did not look up at her, until he had finished writing, when he looked up with great composure. 

“So,” he said, “interesting news out of Ellander.”

“Yes,” she said. “I have a list of observations and concerns. Talking directly to their governor was interesting.”

“I’m certain it was,” he said grimly, eyeing her. “Stop lingering in the doorway,” he growled finally, and she shoved off with her shoulder, hooked the chair opposite his desk with her foot, and dropped down into it in a composed but decidedly unladylike sprawl. 

He sighed silently, arraying his hands deliberately with the fingers interlocked on top of the desk. “So the messaging system was useful,” he said.

“Undeniably,” she said. “It let me know there was something that required personal attention in plenty of time for it.”

“You don’t think you could have sent a message with the relevant information?” Emhyr said. 

“No,” Ciri said. “It needed personal attention.”

“You’ve tipped your hand somewhat, now,” Emhyr pointed out.

Ciri shrugged. “I don’t know how it becoming common knowledge that I’m capable of instantaneous travel is going to harm me,” she said. 

“You don’t, it seems,” Emhyr said. “How much thought did you give it?”

“I’ve given it rather a lot of thought, actually,” Ciri said. 

“And when your enemies notice that your Witchers are a way to immediately command your attention?” Emhyr asked, unlacing his fingers to press the tips together instead as he leaned forward slightly. 

Ciri shook her head slightly. “I was thinking instead that I ought to pay similar visits to other of our remote capitals,” she said, “especially during winter when they are not accustomed to there being much travel. It could be a fine thing indeed to drop in unexpectedly a few places and see how well they square up with their self-reporting.”

Emhyr contemplated that a moment. “Well, you _have_ already tipped your hand as to the entire instantaneous travel gambit.”

“Precisely,” Ciri said. 

He looked away for the span of a breath, and then looked solemnly back at her. “Well,” he said, “speaking of Witchers, the reason I actually called you in here is that there’s credible intelligence that a Witcher is journeying down this direction, so it seems likely that one of your… friends… is coming to visit.”

“Hm,” Ciri said. “Which one?”

Emhyr shook his head. “Sources merely said a Witcher, and that he wasn’t attempting to hide himself in any way.”

“I had a letter from Eskel,” Ciri said. “He didn’t mention it. It’s not likely to be Lambert. So it’s probably Geralt.”

“Or a Witcher from another school,” Emhyr ventured.

“Few of them left,” Ciri said, “and I doubt they’d be open about it.”

Emhyr examined her for a moment. “You’re hoping it’s him,” he said. 

“Why wouldn’t I hope to see him?” Ciri asked. The likelihood that Emhyr was displaying any true jealousy was much lower than that of him using this to try to provoke her, she knew that by now. “He’s someone very important to me and attempting to conceal that would only make it more obvious. For that matter trying to conceal my close ties with any of the Wolf School Witchers would only make me look either weak and foolish, or ungrateful. My past is a matter of public record at this point and while I’m open to adopting a more civilized aspect to make me easier for Nilfgaardians to work with, it seems counterproductive to go beyond that and seem to be pretending not to be what I am.”

“I appreciate the distinction,” Emhyr said, “but you could err more on the side of the civilized aspect,” and he gave her posture a pointed look.

She smiled cheerfully. “I could,” she said, “but I could also save it for someone who isn’t already stuck with me.”

He did not allow himself to tap his fingers but she saw him think about doing it, and counted it a victory. “Indeed,” he said, and she took it as a dismissal, hopped up, and left the room to go see about arranging for guest accommodations to be set up in one of the suites that had a door adjoining one of her own rooms. If no Witchers showed up she could find a way to use it regardless.

* * *

Lambert knew before he opened his eyes that it had snowed. Something about the sharpness of the air, or some quality to the sound-- it had snowed, and significantly. Normally this would occasion a spike of anxiety-- was he prepared? Had everyone arrived? Were they trapped?-- but he remembered, as he woke, that he was currently curled into the chest of a person who was able to use magic to not only levitate but also translocate herself and others, so really it was entirely moot to wonder whether the roads were passable.

Also, this village wasn’t particularly isolated; decent snowshoes would get you to the village center in a matter of a couple hours, and you’d be able to get to the next town by nightfall. This wasn’t the mountains; there weren’t avalanches. Horses could make the trek with sleighs slightly faster than they could with wagons, actually. So the entire question was moot. This wasn’t Kaer Morhen.

He sighed, and opened his eyes, listening to Keira’s heartbeat and taking a moment to enjoy her sleepy scent, laced with a faint lingering scent of last night’s sex. This wasn’t a bad way to spend a winter, at all. But as he rolled gently away from her, shoving his pillow in to replace himself so she wouldn’t roll over and wake herself up, he spared a momentary pang of worry to wonder where Eskel was.

Geralt was probably going to visit Ciri in Nilfgaard, or so she’d said when she’d spoken briefly to Lambert. Eskel had sent a letter, but hadn’t said where he’d be wintering; she’d expected Lambert to know, but he didn’t. He’d told Eskel about this place, had given him directions, and had half-expected him to turn up at some point, but not if it was snowy. They’d been conditioned by now, to turn back away from Kaedwen if it snowed, and head south to find somewhere exposure wouldn’t kill them if they had to subsistence-hunt all winter.

Lambert didn’t like to think about Eskel somewhere out there making do. Though, with such a shortage of Witchers in the world, possibly he was well-occupied and well-paid. Hard to guess. 

He pulled on his shirt and shoved his feet into his house boots and went back to his room, deciding it was the sort of day to wear a dress and cook all day. He could find trousers and go out and tamp down walkways later, if it snowed enough to warrant it. He dug through his chest of clothes and found a suitable dress, a solid woollen petticoat to make it warm, and tall socks, got himself dressed, and went in to the kitchen to get a fire going, before going out to make sure the horses and goat and chickens had enough food and their water wasn’t frozen.

Keira came yawning out a little later once he was back in the kitchen, in a fetching ensemble, oversized woollen trousers and a long wool tunic over about three layers of shirts, and her pretty felt house shoes, and she had her hair twisted and wrapped up under a cap and she looked like a boy and also looked all sleep-soft and cute. She paused, yawning, and looked at Lambert and blinked for a bit, and he knew he hadn’t worn a dress in front of her before, but he didn’t stop kneading the bread he was working on.

She yawned again, snapped her teeth shut, sniffled, and said, “You look cute,” before she shuffled over to the table and sat down.

“So do you,” he said, warm in the middle. He had a kerchief on his head, for the warmth, but also because it made him not have his dad’s hairline. It wasn’t the same as having long hair like he’d always wished for, but it wasn’t bad. 

She yawned again. “It snowed,” she said.

“Looks like a pretty good coating,” he said. “I figure I’ll go stamp down paths later and really see to the horses but first, it’s a good day to spend cooking.”

She smiled sleepily at him. “I can see to the paths,” she said. “If it means you make me more treats.”

He shook his head. “Save your magic for the big stuff,” he said, “I got feet and they work fine. I’ll need the exercise.”

* * *

Keira sat on the kitchen table stirring things she was told to stir and watching Lambert in his pretty dress. It was a plain enough dress, peasant-y, a cheap cheerful sensible blue with a tacked-on woven edging in yellow and red around the hem, around the waist, around the top of the bodice, and the petticoat under was the traditional faded red dye for warmth-- likely, he’d bought it used. Some part of her thought he ought to look odd or incongruous, but it was clearly a garment he’d worn before and was comfortable in, and he moved in all the little unconscious ways habitual skirt-wearers did, the absent little hitch of the hips to make sure the hem cleared an obstacle, the knee-first stride to make sure the ankles didn’t tangle. He looked _right_ , and she let her eyes go unfocused and her mind recalibrate as she watched.

She’d been extravagant in her last purchases of provisions, so there was both honey and real sugar in the pantry, and a generous amount of butter, and flour, and she’d bought him bread dough and ever since he’d been making fresh bread for her and it was astonishing to her that this involved no magic. She’d bought storage vegetables as well, and meat under preserving charms. 

The things Lambert did to transform these ingredients into food-- _well_ , she thought, _this must be how magic looks to people who can’t do magic._

As each thing he finished-- sweet things and savory things alternated, each more satisfying than the last-- was done cooking, they each ate a portion, and then Keira put the rest under preserving charms so that on some other day they could eat it freshly prepared again. 

By early afternoon, they were both stuffed, the snow had stopped falling, and the sun had come out. Lambert went and changed into trousers, to her disappointment. “I know,” he said, “I like the dress too, but it’s not as good in the snow.” 

“At least now I have a better view of your ass,” she said, which was true; his ass looked fantastic in the trousers he was wearing. He’d put on a little weight already, she judged, and you could see it there most of all. She accompanied him out into the snow, having declined to change her clothes, and simply cast a spell to keep herself warm. She did deign to put on real boots, mostly because she wanted to save him getting worked up about something for a subject more entertaining than shoes. (She’d decided after the realization that making fun of his foot fetish was an Aiden thing that she’d refrain from baiting him on that topic. It wasn’t as though there weren’t thousands of other topics upon which to bait him.)

He trampled down the snow on the path to the barn, and she followed after him, surreptitiously using magic to straighten the path and then looking innocent whenever he turned around to catch her at it. One of those times, he turned around and threw a snowball at her, and she deflected it with magic and pelted him in return the same way, which he declared was cheating, and then they had to chase one another around in the garden and he tackled her into a snowdrift and it was funny and also arousing because he was so big and so strong and yet the impact was so soft in the snow.

“Fuck,” she said, abandoning the idea of struggling, and he grinned down at her and kissed her and then got back up and she only saved herself from having snow shoved down her shirt with a sudden magic deflection.

“Cheating,” he said.

“Not really,” she answered.

They checked on the animals, as the boy from the village wouldn’t be able to come without great difficulty. Everyone was fine, though Lil Bleater was bored. Lambert played a game with the goat, which was something Keira hadn’t realized one could do, and she laughed until she couldn’t stand up as the two of them chased one another around the tiny snow-and-mud-filled paddock.

Eventually the goat had enough, and Lambert climbed the paddock fence and perched there, looking scenic and surveying the view of the woods. “That might be it, for the snow,” he said. 

Keira excavated herself from the snowdrift she’d fallen into in her laughter, and climbed up onto the fence with him. “I could try and divine the upcoming weather,” she said, “but weather magic is so… unrewarding. You can get a reasonable idea of what’s going on but it’s so hard to predict anything more than a few days away, and you can just about kill yourself trying.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t much care.” He looked at her, with a fond half-smile that made her heart twist a little. “It’s not like we can get snowed in. You can translocate.”

“It’s true,” she said, and made a little gesture, making a little plume of levitated snowflakes spiral gracefully away from her hand. “I can’t be snowed in.” There just wasn’t anywhere better for her to go, she thought wistfully, but it wasn’t worth saying. “But--”

There was a strange screeching sound, and Lambert whipped around to look. Keira squinted up at the sky, looking around as she tried to figure out what the sound was-- it echoed in the surrounding woods, some great beast perhaps. 

“Wyvern,” he said. “Shouldn’t be--” He froze, staring, clearly listening to something she couldn’t hear. “Fuck!”

He hopped down from the fence and she followed him. “Is it,” she said, and he held up his hand, freezing to listen. 

“It’s down the way at the neighbors’,” Lambert said, and spun to run back toward the house. “I’ll never get there in time.”

“I can translocate,” Keira reminded him, and while she was at it, she levitated herself, grabbed him, and deposited them back at the house. “Get your things and I’ll get us there,” she said, pausing to put on a real coat. She was just a hedgewitch to these people; she couldn’t do anything flashy, but a portal to somewhere nearby they could run in from wasn’t too much. 

Lambert shook his head slightly as if dazed, and then ran into his room. He came back out in a moment with both swords, a little satchel he was tucking potion bottles into, and a fur-lined hat. “Get us there,” he said, and Keira opened a portal.

* * *

The neighbors had clearly been waiting for the snow to slaughter one of their cows, which was sensible-- let it eat while there was still grass, but once the grass was covered and it would require supplemental feeding, it was time to convert it to food in its turn. But they’d done it outdoors, and it was coincidental with this wyvern suddenly finding prey harder to find, and the smell had attracted the creature.

It was an older one, with a bad eye and a damaged wing. Not likely it’d make it through the winter, even if Lambert didn’t interfere; a prime candidate for becoming a nuisance, and in fact it probably already was, just far enough away that Lambert hadn’t gotten word of it yet.

Thanks to Keira, Lambert got there in time to save the foolhardy boy who tended their stables, who’d somehow thought he’d have any kind of success getting between the wyvern and the carcass of their cow. The wyvern had faced off with him, and would have killed him in a moment, except that Lambert had a crossbow and shot it three times as it started its charge. 

It did mean that nobody had noticed Keira’s portal, which was good for her disguise as just a cunning woman. Said disguise also meant she wouldn’t be backing Lambert up with any kind of concrete magical abilities, like her favorite lightning bolts, unfortunately, but he’d killed plenty of wyverns without that sort of backup, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

He’d had time to chug a Thunderbolt on the way over here, so he went for a direct attack-- hit the creature with an _Aard_ as it tried to get airborne to attack him, and then dove in to hit it with a rain of sword-blows. 

It threw him off after a moment, and he dove back out of the way, circling a little ways out of the barnyard, away from the cow carcass, away from the boy who was still lying in the snow but was starting to sit up dazedly, away from the boy’s shrieking mother, away from the other children and the father or uncle or whoever that was. 

It lunged after him, but couldn’t quite line up a good attack on him, and as it reared back, weaving back and forth, he cast a _Quen_ on himself and then hit it with another _Aard_ to knock it back so he could leap in and hit it a few more times with the sword.

He’d wounded it enough that it was bleeding badly, but not enough to disable it; it thrashed and caught him hard enough to break his _Quen_ shield, though that threw it back painfully. He rolled to his feet and cast another one on himself as he scrambled back away. 

The wyvern was clearly reconsidering this fight, contemplating making its escape. He couldn’t let it; it was dangerous, and would hunt humans, injured as it was. He pulled his crossbow again, and shot it twice before it could manage to turn itself around to leap on him. 

He had to drop the crossbow to get an _Aard_ up in time to knock the thing aside so it didn’t land on him, and he leapt up and socked it pretty good a couple of times with the sword while it was flailing off-balance. It caught him squarely with a claw-strike, but only got the _Quen_ , and got stung with the backlash as it exploded, and Lambert followed up with another couple of solid sword-strikes.

But the thing got in a lucky hit with its tail, which he should have seen coming but he just wasn’t fast enough getting the _Quen_ back up, and the tail hit him first and sent him flying.

Not being in armor made that hurt _a lot_ , and he rolled clumsily, failed to get to his feet, and finally got his _Quen_ up just in time for the thing to pounce on him and get blown back.

That was it though, that was all the time he had, and he scrambled to his feet, winded-- of course he still had his sword, it had been beaten into him so thoroughly that he wouldn’t let go of the thing for any less than getting his arm cut off-- and managed to get the sword between himself and the thing’s jaws, dealing it a terrible wound in the face just as its teeth did a fair bit of damage to his unarmored arm and chest. But it broke off its attack, shrieking, and he was able to hit it pretty solidly with an _Aard_ that knocked it down, and he cast a _Quen_ on himself and leapt in with his sword again.

He finished it off with his sword between its jaws, and its death throes burst his _Quen_ again and he was prepared for that, but then one more spasm raked several of its claws against his torso and the fact that he wasn’t wearing armor was suddenly _a problem_. 

He staggered back, slightly too late, and managed to get himself another couple of paces backward before he fell into the snow, curling around his sword and just lying there for a moment. Ah, fuck, that was sore; it had done a bunch of damage deeper than his skin, for sure. 

“Lambert,” Keira said, and she dropped to her knees next to him.

“Next time I stop for the armor,” he said. He could taste blood, and it was his, which was bad, but he’d been in worse predicaments. 

Her hands hovered over him, and she looked genuinely horrified, like she didn’t know where to start. “ _Lambert_ ,” she said, distraught.

He managed to give her a smile, ghastly though it probably looked. “Hey I can try your cantrip again,” he said, and gritted his teeth to scrape the bottom of the barrel of his strength before he remembered the power object was still tied to his wrist. He pulled from that instead and cast a _Cura_ on the entire unpleasant abdominal situation, and-- 

Witchers didn’t pass out from pain, it was part of the whole deal, but he went a little fuzzy for a moment as the edges of his vision pressed in dark and his guts rearranged themselves somewhat. He un-rolled his eyes back out of somewhere in the back of his head, and blinked up at Keira, who looked absolutely stricken, white-faced and horrified, and was still sitting motionless with her hands hovering over him.

“Oh, that’s better,” he said, as the pain faded and left behind-- well, still pain, but less. Good to know-- _Cura_ was maybe worth about half a Swallow, from what he could approximately tell. Good data. He could think, now. “Help me sit up,” he said, since she was right there.

“Did you,” she said, and took his arm and pulled him upright. “You used the power object!”

“I did,” he said. Sitting up was terrible, he had broken ribs for sure. This wasn’t a time for fucking about with cantrips. He pulled a Swallow out of his satchel and downed it, closing his eyes against the burn. There were a couple of sick little crunching pops as his ribs snapped back into position, but that sort of pain tended to go into a searing white-hot place that his mind interpreted as hot and cold at the same time instead of as pain, so it was a little easier to take. He held his breath a moment, hitching in a little more air to make sure the ribs healed properly with room for his lungs to fully inflate, and then let it out slowly, tentatively. 

Keira had pulled away a little, apparently convinced he would live, and was looking over at-- ah, this little settlement’s inhabitants. Someone, greatly daring, had come over.

“H-how bad is he?” a woman’s voice asked, a little shaky.

“He’s all right,” Keira said, subdued.

“I’m a Witcher,” Lambert said, teeth gritted as the Swallow re-connected something in his guts to something else with a nasty little gurgle. “This is the sort of shit we do.” He shook out his hands, paused to press the skinned knuckles of one hand into the snow for a moment as the Swallow burned at them too (gauntlets would’ve been smart), and looked up. 

The woman was too young to be their stable boy’s mother. Might be a sister or something, or an aunt-- this seemed to be the kind of joint where there were a few related families packed in together. “What was that thing?” she asked.

“Wyvern,” Lambert said. “Old, and injured, not really up for doing its own hunting.” He shook out his arms and rolled his head from side to side, making sure his shoulders were correctly in their sockets before he used his arms to lever himself to his feet, and retrieved his sword from next to himself.

The woman and Keira both stood staring at the place he’d been lying for a moment, and he glanced over. It was a lot of blood, stark in the snow. “That’s probably poison,” he said, “don’t let any kids play in that stuff.”

“What about the creature?” the woman asked.

“This,” Lambert said, “is good eating, though one this old is probably pretty tough.”

* * *

Keira waited until they were out of sight into the woods to open a portal for them to get back to the house. Lambert staggered a little as he walked next to her, in good cheer and clearly pleased with himself all over. He’d returned the coat one of the women of the settlement had pressed on him, and was wearing his horribly-torn one again, and she couldn’t look at it, couldn’t bear to see how it was torn and stained with blood. Every time she closed her eyes she saw him horribly wounded again, the blood in his teeth and the horrible gleam of mangled flesh through his ripped coat. She’d been so sure he was dying, and she’d just been standing there uselessly through the whole fight, trying to look like a simple hedgewitch because she was too cowardly to let these people know for sure that she was truly a mage.

He’d enjoyed helping the villagers butcher the dead wyvern, and had a sack laden with all the parts that were good for alchemy, and another sack with a few chunks of meat. They’d thrown in some decent cuts from the cow they’d been butchering as well, as a thanks. Possibly, the wyvern’s head could net Lambert some sort of bounty from the local officials, but it had been left out in the forest, fastened high up a tree so no necrophages or large scavengers would be drawn to it, and the matter would be addressed once the roads were passable. Lambert didn’t seem too concerned. 

He hadn’t seemed concerned about any of it. He’d fought beautifully, but Keira had seen him fight before, and she knew what kind of economical poetry there was in his movements, a savagely beautiful dance of grace and power. And his total lack of concern for his own body should have been nothing new for her, but it had been different today, frightening in a way she wasn’t used to.

“I should have helped you,” she said. He glanced over at her, puzzled. “With the-- wyvern. I could have helped so you didn’t get hurt.”

He shrugged. “It was fine,” he said. “It-- that looked worse than it was, really.”

“I could even have helped without giving up the game,” she said, as the portal winked out behind them. The goat had let herself out, and greeted them with interest, then shied away, alarmed by either the scent of blood or the smell of the wyvern and cattle parts in the bag. “I should practice that. At least I could cast you a few shielding spells so you don’t have to use your own.”

He shrugged. “I don’t need or expect any help,” he said, slightly distracted by the goat. He made to set down the bag, but Keira gestured, penning the goat in a little holding spell, and then levitated her back to the barn as she bleated in protest. 

_Don’t need or expect any help_ , she thought glumly, walking over to the barn to make sure the goat landed correctly in her own paddock. When she came back to the house, Lambert was unloading the bag of packaged meat, sorting it into piles on the table, and he had the sections of wyvern hide he’d planned to cure set aside. 

“That is,” he said, sounding awkward. “I mean. It’s nice when you do help. I’m just not counting on it, you know?”

He probably did mean to be nice. She dredged up a smile and said, “I know,” pleasantly enough. “It’s not like we’re soulmates or lifemates or something.” She made her smile cheerful, and collected all the alchemical harvest from the wyvern and brought it into the workshop so she could close the door and lean there for a moment in private. 

It was fine. He didn’t need or expect any help. It was nice. That was what they were to each other. The love of his life was dead and he didn’t need or expect anything from her but it was nice that she was around. This wasn’t a love story, or anything. Sorceresses and Witchers got to be in plenty of fairy-tale stories, but never the ones that involved true love or any of the bullshit in that vein. 

She sighed, collected and composed herself, and went back out to help put the meat away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I promised plot? It's a-comin', folks. Get ready for the sequel.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Anoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anoke/pseuds/Anoke/works?fandom_id=299357) for beta and general cheerleading.


End file.
